Cooling towers are utilized to remove heat from process water through evaporation and heat transfer. Fill utilized in such cooling towers should possess high heat resistance and, equally important, minimal water saturation capacity.
It is well-known that asbestos fibers and synthetic rubber binders can be formed into felt sheet compositions that, when suitably shaped, can be utilized to make generally satisfactory cooling tower fill. Customarily, such sheets are impregnated with various materials to improve the sheets' rigidity, lifetime and wet strength, decrease the sheets' rate of water absorption and to provide sheet materials that lend themselves more readily to the formation of shaped cooling tower fill materials in corrugated and saddle forms. Suitable impregnating materials are resins such as melamine-formaldehyde resins and phenol resins and chlorinated rubber. The chlorinated rubber is particularly desirable to use for such purposes because, besides the advantageous properties set forth above, it also imparts an improved degree of fire resistance to the asbestos synthetic rubber binder sheets.
It has been discovered, however, that asbestos-rubber binder sheets which normally take up water based resins such as melamine formaldehyde resins and phenol resins do not as readily take up the chlorinated natural rubber. Therefore, it would be desirable to improve the saturation capacity of the sheets for the chlorinated natural rubber.
It is an object, therefore, of the present invention to improve the saturation capacity of standard asbestos fiber-rubber binder cooling tower fill compositions for chlorinated natural rubber.
This, and other objects as expressed herein, is surprisingly accomplished by incorporating a small amount of a specified acrylic acid polymer in an asbestos fiber-synthetic rubber binder composition to thereby produce a composition that has improved saturation capacity for chlorinated natural rubber and which thereby can be formed into cooling tower fill with improved properties.